ICJS Jewish Scholar Benjamin Sax wrote the recently published “Winged Words: Benjamin, Rosenzweig, and the Life of Quotation,” which has the distinction of being the first book to explore the role of quotation in modern Jewish thought. The book focuses on two German-Jewish intellectuals active during the Weimar Republic, Walter Benjamin and Franz Rosenzweig. As Ben notes in his introduction to the book, “Even though they followed different intellectual paths, for many of their readers a similar rebellious impulse animated their critiques of Jewish assimilation, religion, and Zionism.” This Q & A with Ben has been edited for clarity and length.
What inspired you to write this book?
Initially, when I researched for my dissertation, I noticed that the philosopher who I was reading, Franz Rosenzweig, quoted often, yet he would rarely provide any citation. It seemed that quotation was sort of interwoven into his style of writing. Also, if you didn’t know the quotations, then you wouldn’t know that anything was quoted. I wondered whether this practice was intentional, since it was possible that his readers might have known these sources. Was this a pedagogical approach? Maybe polemical? And, the more I looked into it, the more I realized that only about half the sources would have been known to his readers. These were the quotations from classical German writers and philosophers. I discovered that he was trying to teach a practice of Jewish writing and thinking through his style of quotation by engaging interestingly the sources and tradition of German philosophy.
After I finished my doctoral work, I published a few articles on Rosenzweig’s method of quotation and I started venturing into other areas of modern Jewish thought in my research. But this idea just kept coming back, “Why do people quote? And what does that say about the process and nature of thinking?”
I know that there is a tension between how linguists and philosophers understand the relationship between language and thought. Which comes first, language or thought? Does language determine thought or merely describe it? Do different languages offer different access to thought, or are all languages describing and interpreting similar thought processes? Obviously answering these questions can disclose what you might think about translation, culture, or even what it means to be human. In my book, I was interested in examining how quotation helps us understand this relationship between language and thought. So what happens when you quote? How is that related to thinking? Linguists like [Ferdinand de] Saussure and others argued that every sentence is a quotation of something else. All we do is reference the past in conveying ideas in the present. Everything is a trace, as [Jacques] Derrida argued, everything is a quotation. If that’s true, then where’s our agency? What are we thinking about when we are alone with our private thoughts, are they really our thoughts, or are they merely quotations from others? What is the self who interprets all of these phrases, sentences, gestures? The issue of quotation has been a thorn in my mind for a really long time. It can become this labyrinth, trying to find the original source of something, yet behind that original source often lies something else. It seemingly goes on ad infinitum. Yet, it is also essential, in my view, to understanding theology and the many aspects comprising the phenomenon of religion.
What was it that made you focus on Benjamin and Rosenzweig?
Despite being notoriously opaque in their style of writing, they were both explicit that they were working with quotation. Both of them came out of the same intellectual, cultural and socio-economic milieu: both were German Jews, both highly educated, both committed to Europe in different ways, both understood religion as a form of expression and language, both were wary of nationalism and Zionism, both were wary of orthodoxy and organized religion. And despite the many similarities between them, they were very different in their thinking, both politically and theologically. But the thing that brought them together was this idea of quotation. And what was interesting to me is they both argued and understood their style of quotation as a Jewish form of expression. Explicitly Jewish.
How so?
Here’s an example from Rosenzweig. If you believe that the Torah is God’s word, then biblical language matters theologically. In Jewish liturgy, many prayers are actually citations from the Hebrew Bible. So when you pray to God, you are actually saying God’s word back to God, as a form of your own expression, as a form of your own penitence. And for Rosenzweig, that is the act of mercy, because, if God is truly beyond, the gift of God’s word is that you can use God’s word in order to speak to God, often in ways that human beings cannot.
For Benjamin, quotation allowed him to consider what he felt to be a Jewish method of thinking. Jewish tradition, at least as understood at the time, didn’t portray history as teleological with a beginning, middle and end, but rather as cyclical, and that you participate in eternity by participating in cyclical Jewish time, because it’s not moving in any one direction. Quotation in Judaism disrupts any linear understanding of time, since you often return to the same sources reinterpreting, spiraling, almost like in an Escher painting.
He saw this as a way to combat the forces of fascism, capitalism, and even communism in that all of those things understood themselves to be part of a linear understanding of human history. And so he wanted quotation or montages of quotation to disrupt this understanding of something linear, because if it’s linear, then it’s something you believe that you can understand and control. Whereas if it’s cyclical, you cannot. And so both of them thought quotations were explicitly Jewish and essential for disrupting cultural norms. But they approached it very differently because Rosenzweig was a theologian and Benjamin was a cultural critic. Rosenzweig was a fairly conservative political thinker and Benjamin was a very liberal political thinker. It was interesting to me how both these thinkers thought about the role of quotation in philosophy and in life, but also why they considered quotation a Jewish form of thinking.
What do you hope people will take away from your book?
Very often we hear that we are living in polarized times. That many people simply inhabit different realities. That dialogue is impossible. I disagree with this final assertion–I want people to know that dialogue is still possible. In my conclusion I explore why I want people to consider how both Benjamin and Rosenzweig are relevant today for reasons that neither could have anticipated. My main argument is that quotation is a dialogical practice.
Whether philosophies of language are opaque, whether the linguistics behind quotation are complicated, the reality is that they inform our lives in myriad ways. And I want people to really consider how quotation functions in their day-to-day life, and the sorts of things that they reference and think about in relation to what it is they value, and who they think they are. Quotation in my view represents our inclination to meet the Other. Language and culture may determine those quotations, but we are not bound by them.
An example that I give in my conclusion is that most people today could identify 200 to 300 corporate logos, but they couldn’t tell you five native plant species in their own garden. So when we talk about what is real and what is natural, our economic and cultural systems have determined, in some way, our intuitions. I can’t even identify certain plants, but I can tell you: that’s Coca-Cola. It changes my frame of reference–what I can quote– and how I think. And I would argue it changes who we are. How do you find that balance between living in a society and also changing the realities that you believe govern or at least influence your life? How can we change language to open ourselves up for more possibilities for dialogue?
I want people to walk away from my book thinking that this balance is not only a lifelong process worth thinking about, or, even considering what I would call a mysticism of ordinary experience, but is essential to understanding how we experience others and the world. When someone asks how you are, there’s something quoted and rehearsed in your answer that’s not actually relevant to the question itself. You might say you’re “good.” You’ve answered a question about your wellbeing with a moral statement. Who are you to say that you’re good or bad? But also you’re saying “good” so that you can avoid further engagement with that person dialogically. It’s rehearsed, it’s performative, it’s quoted, it’s understood, and it becomes part of the nature of our daily interactions: People as a possible means to an end. And so the deeper question I want people to walk away with is: Is that really who we want to be, who we think we are? And my guess is most people would say “no.” So what do they need to do to start thinking about language and society in ways that not only fit their own aspirations and hopes, but also those of everyone else? Because right now, I believe that most people would say it is unbalanced and that there are very few opportunities to think about and to even consider changing it. In the end, I hope my book can at least convince readers that it is not only possible, but is essential to our survival.